Sonari Glinton

Doby Photography
/ NPR

Sonari Glinton is a NPR Business Desk Correspondent based at our NPR West bureau. He covers the auto industry, consumer goods, and consumer behavior, as well as marketing and advertising for NPR and Planet Money.

In this position, which he has held since late 2010, Glinton has tackled big stories including GM's road back to profitability and Toyota's continuing struggles. In addition, Glinton covered the 2012 presidential race, the Winter Olympics in Sochi, as well as the U.S. Senate and House for NPR.

Glinton came to NPR in August 2007 and worked as a producer for All Things Considered. Over the years Glinton has produced dozen of segments about the great American Song Book and pop culture for NPR's signature programs most notably the 50 Great Voices piece on Nat King Cole feature he produced for Robert Siegel.

Glinton began his public radio career as an intern at Member station WBEZ in Chicago. He worked his way through his public radio internships working for Chicago Jazz impresario Joe Segal, waiting tables and meeting legends such as Ray Brown, Oscar Brown Jr., Marian MacPartland, Ed Thigpen, Ernestine Andersen, and Betty Carter.

Glinton attended Boston University. A Sinatra fan since his mid-teens, Glinton's first forays into journalism were album revues and a college jazz show at Boston University's WTBU. In his spare time Glinton indulges his passions for baking, vinyl albums, and the evolution of the Billboard charts.

President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Thursday night to say Ford Motor Co. executive chairman William Ford Jr. had called to say the company would not move production of the Lincoln MKC from its Louisville Assembly Plant to Mexico.

A second Trump tweet claimed credit for the decision.

Ford, however, said it neither planned to close the Louisville, Ky., plant nor reduce jobs there. The company said it had considered moving Lincoln production to Mexico to increase production of the Ford Escape in Louisville.

As iconic as the brand Smith & Wesson is, the name is not expansive enough for the company's ambitions. Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. is asking its shareholders to approve changing the name to American Outdoor Brands Corp. But its firearms will keep their famous name.

The company says it will likely change its ticker symbol to AOBC from the current SWHC. The name change has already been approved by the company's board of directors. Shareholders get a vote on Dec. 13, according to a statement from the company.

Near the entrance to Santa Monica pier stood a circle of Volkswagen Golfs, each with a driver. The purpose was to ferry attendees of a weeknight car unveiling to their own vehicles somewhere in the vast oceanfront parking lot. Perfectly framed by the pier's roller coaster in the background is the Volkswagen Atlas. If you want the company's answer to a year of scandal, this is it: what VW calls a mid-size SUV that has three rows that seat seven passengers.

General Motors appears to have won the October sales race among the big automakers. GM saw its sales fall by just 1.7 percent in October. It has good company in those sales declines, being joined by nearly all the other carmakers. Overall, automobile sales in the U.S. are expected to drop between 6 and 8 percent when all the reports are in.

American Airlines Flight 383, a Boeing 767, aborted its takeoff at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport Friday and caught fire. The airline gave the cause as "an engine-related issue." The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane blew a tire. Passengers were evacuated onto the runway.

The city's Office of Emergency Management said 20 people were injured. Earlier the airline had said seven passengers and one flight attendant reported minor injuries and were taken to a hospital. The airline said it rescheduled the rest of the passengers on other flights.

Smartphone chip maker Qualcomm Inc. has agreed to buy NXP Semiconductors for $38 billion. The agreement allows Qualcomm, which makes chips for Apple and Android, to become the top seller of semiconductors for the car business.

Qualcomm's core business is in processors and wireless chips for smartphones. The deal allows the San Diego-based company to reduce its dependence on smartphones, a huge business that has reached a plateau.

Tesla surprised Wall Street Wednesday by posting a profit of nearly $22 million for the third quarter. It's a surprise because it's only the second time in the company's history that it has posted a quarterly profit.

Striking professors reached a tentative three-year contract Friday with the state of Pennsylvania. Faculty members had gone on strike Wednesday at 14 public colleges and universities across the state, according to Katie Meyers of NPR member station WITF.

Tesla has begun equipping all its new cars with self-driving hardware. Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, tweeted Wednesday night that the new Tesla drives itself with no human input, using eight cameras, 12 ultrasonars, and radar. All this hardware is mounted so the technology is not visible to drivers.

A federal jury in Los Angeles found New York Knicks guard Derrick Rose not liable Wednesday in a civil suit that accused him and two friends of rape. Ryan Allen and Randall Hampton, the two friends, were also cleared.

At some point everyone, regardless of party affiliation or lack thereof, wants to bail from a presidential election. Okay, that's a hunch, but it's borne out, at least in part (caveats aplenty), in an online survey by the American Psychological Association.

Aisha Buhari, Nigeria's first lady, says she may not back her husband, President Muhammadu Buhari, in the next election. That piece of news has caused the head of Africa's most-populous country and largest economy embarrassment while on a diplomatic mission.

In an interview with the BBC, Mrs. Buhari warned that she may not vote for her husband because he's lost control of his government and "does not know 45 out of 50 of the people he appointed."

The U.S. Treasury Department issued rules Thursday aimed at stemming the practice of "tax inversions." This is the practice where a company moves its legal home abroad in order to avoid or minimize U.S. taxes.

The suspect in last month's bombings in New Jersey and New York that injured dozens pleaded not guilty Thursday.

Ahmad Khan Rahimi was arraigned in Elizabeth, N.J., via teleconference. The 28-year-old Rahimi has been recovering in a hospital after a shootout with police. He pleaded not guilty to state charges of attempted murder and weapons offenses.

The charges are related to Rahimi's alleged detonation on Sept. 17 of a pipe bomb along the route of a charity race in Seaside Park, N.J., and a pressure-cooker bomb in New York. No one was hurt in the New Jersey bombing.

The brakes on the New Jersey Transit train that crashed into the platform at Hoboken Terminal on Sept. 29 show no signs of any defect. That's according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board released Thursday.

One of the biggest questions around self-driving cars is about safety. In the blink of an eye would the vehicle, say, endanger the occupant to save another driver or pedestrian? There are any number of answers for a variety of scenarios. Mercedes-Benz, the world's oldest carmaker, says as its vehicles get smarter, it will program its self-driving models to make the lives of the occupants the priority.

Samsung Electronics profits estimate took a hit, on news it was discontinuing its flagship phone. The company says it is adjusting its earning and cutting its operating profit by $2.3 billion. That's after Samsung ended production of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. A number of the phones overheated causing fires just months after it was launched.

In malls all across the U.S., customers stood on line for a much-hyped makeup collection get named after Selena Quintanilla, a Grammy award-winning Tejano superstar, who was shot and killed by a fan in 1995. The products are made by MAC Cosmetics, a subsidiary of Estee Lauder, with the cooperation of the singer's heirs.

On social media, fans posted photos of lines to purchase the makeup, saying some devotees even waited overnight. A number of stores reported they'd run out of the items, as did online sellers.

The recall is massive for VW. The company sold approximately 350,000 vehicles in the last year.

There are actually three separate recalls but all pertain to fuel leaks, though the defects could be different. For many vehicles the suction pump in the fuel tank was improperly assembled, according to Volkswagen.

Zero. That's the stated goal of transportation officials in the U.S., no traffic fatalities by 2046. Zero deaths is a movement that began in Sweden. There, it's called Vision Zero. The idea is simple. "No loss of life is acceptable." That is the one sentence motto of Sweden's campaign.

On Friday, police released two videos of Tuesday's fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by officers in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, Calif. Ugandan immigrant Alfred Olango was killed after, police say, he was uncooperative and refused to remove his hand from his pocket, then took what officers saw as a threatening position.

Olango's death led to almost immediate protests that lasted much of the week and grew progressively larger and angrier. The police say that by Thursday night two civilians had been assaulted and crowds had thrown bottles at officers.